| Ben Lamm | |
| Birth Name: | Benjamin Edward Lamm |
| Birth Date: | 4 December 1981 |
| Birth Place: | Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Alma Mater: | Baylor University |
| Occupation: | Serial entrepreneur |
| Known For: | Founding: |
Ben Lamm is an American serial entrepreneur best known for partnering with George Church on the idea for de-extinction and founding a venture capital-backed startup known as Colossal to support Church's work in the development of genetic engineering and reproductive technology.[1]
In 2019, Lamm used $15 million in seed funding to apply genetic technology such as "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" (CRISPR) for Colossal's work on conservation biology.[2] [3] At its launch in 2021, he received media attention for claiming that Colossal would "bring back the wooly mammoth" within the next decade. Lamm secured investments from public figures such as Paris Hilton, Charles Hoskinson, and Thomas Tull and has raised more than $75 million as of March 2022.[4] [5] During the 2022 South by Southwest festival, Lamm was on a panel moderated by Richard Garriott that made the case for de-extinction.[6]
Lamm founded his first company when he was a senior at Baylor University.[7] He sold ventures such as Simply Interactive, an e-learning software company (acquired by Agile in 2010), Chaotic Moon Studios, a mobile app company (acquired by Accenture in 2015), Team Chaos, a digital gaming company (acquired by Zynga in 2016), Conversable, a SaaS conversational bot technology (acquired by LivePerson in 2018), and Hypergiant Industries, a machine-learning artificial intelligence, for undisclosed sums upon each company's acquisition.[8] [9] [10] Lamm remains a member of the board for Hypergiant.[11]
In late 2022, Lamm co-founded Form Bio, a software company spun out of Colossal Biosciences. The company aims to develop software to improve the working efficiency of scientists. Form Bio was funded through a $30 million investment deal involving Thomas Tull.[12]